Fair skin and blonde hair in mid day sun

What a great shoot this weekend. Only in Central Florida could you have such great photo session weather in mid December. For reference, it was 78 degrees, mostly sunny and just a slight breeze. This senior portrait style shoot was going to take place outside and due to our subject’s day job we had to shoot at the worst time for a photographer, high noon. Another challenge was the fact that our subject has vary fair skin and blonde (almost white in sections) hair which is very easy to over expose. The easiest was to overcome such harsh sunlight conditions is find a location that gives you filtered sunlight. For our purpose I used the Cedar trees on the side of my house. In addition I was using a variable ND filter on my lenses that gives me up to 7 additional stops. This allows me to use a lower fstop value in the camera for a very shallow depth of field. Any highschool or college senior would be happy with the results of these senior portraits.